The Government Needs People Who Can Say No

Independence means little when using it costs someone their position.

Every functioning government needs people who can say no.

No, the evidence does not support that conclusion. No, the numbers cannot be changed to fit the message. No, the law does not permit that action. No, the election result cannot be revised. No, the bridge is not safe, the drug is not proven, the plan is not sufficient.

These refusals can be inconvenient. They can obstruct the preferences of elected leaders and delay the machinery of government. They can also be the last working safeguard between political desire and public harm.

That is why independence must be protected, institutionalized, and empowered. Hiring someone to exercise independent judgment means little if reaching the wrong judgment for those in power costs them their position.

The Supreme Court has recently narrowed that protection at the highest levels of government. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court held that the president must be able to remove principal officers who exercise executive power, including commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission. Congress may have designed the FTC to operate with some independence, but that design must now yield to presidential control.

One day later, the Court recognized an important exception. In Trump v. Cook, it affirmed that governors of the Federal Reserve may continue to receive protection from removal without cause. The Court pointed to the Fed’s distinctive history, structure, and place in the constitutional order.

The legal reasoning is specific. The implication is much larger.

We still understand why independence matters when the stakes include interest rates, inflation, and the stability of financial markets. We understand that monetary policy becomes dangerous when it is manipulated for the short-term interests of a president. We understand that some judgments must be insulated from the threat of political removal if they are to retain public credibility.

We simply refuse to apply that understanding consistently.

If political pressure can corrupt monetary policy, it can corrupt scientific findings, safety inspections, labor enforcement, election administration, statistical reporting, consumer protection, public health, and legal review. The economy is not the only public interest endangered when professional judgment becomes subordinate to political permission.

This problem extends well below the leadership of independent agencies. The first Trump administration created Schedule F in 2020 to reclassify career positions involved in policy and make them easier to remove. The order was revoked before it could be fully implemented, then reinstated at the beginning of the second Trump administration and renamed Schedule Policy/Career.

The administration argues that the affected positions will remain merit-based and that employees are not required to support the president personally or politically. Its rules also retain protections against certain prohibited personnel practices and retaliation for whistleblowing. Those are meaningful assurances.

But the new system also exempts covered employees from ordinary adverse-action procedures, making them substantially easier to dismiss. The administration says this is necessary to address poor performance, misconduct, and what it calls the “subversion” of presidential directives. The hundreds of pages of positions transferred into the new category include attorneys, analysts, safety specialists, budget officers, program managers, grants personnel, and other professionals distributed across the federal government.

This is presented as accountability. But accountability and obedience are not the same thing.

Government employees should be accountable for misconduct, corruption, incompetence, and failure. Career protections should not become shelter for people who cannot or will not perform their duties. Elected leaders also have a legitimate right to set policy within the authority granted to them by law.

But public servants have obligations that run in more than one direction. They are accountable to lawful executive direction, but also to statutes enacted by Congress, evidence within their disciplines, professional standards, the people affected by their decisions, and the long-term public interest.

Those obligations will sometimes conflict. That is precisely when protection matters.

An attorney who can be fired for an unwelcome legal interpretation is not fully empowered to provide legal judgment. A scientist who can be removed for producing inconvenient findings is not meaningfully independent. In each case, the expertise may remain formally present while its purpose has been hollowed out.

Independent institutions depend upon independent people. A commission cannot exercise real independence if its members serve at the pleasure of the president. Protected commissioners cannot exercise informed judgment if the analysts beneath them can be purged for presenting unwelcome evidence. Career experts cannot exercise meaningful discretion if professional disagreement can be recast as insubordination.

Each layer protects the next. Remove enough of them and the institution may retain its name, offices, and statutory mission while becoming incapable of anything other than sycophancy.

None of this means experts should rule without democratic constraint. Independence must itself be bounded by law, transparent standards, meaningful review, and systems capable of distinguishing principled refusal from poor performance or ideological obstruction. A Stewardship government would need stronger accountability, not less of it. But that accountability must protect the public from both bureaucratic failure and political coercion.

We do not protect public servants because they are always right. We protect their capacity to exercise judgment because political power must not be the only authority allowed to decide what is true.

A government that cannot be told no is not an accountable one. It is an autocracy.